


And conquer it you will

by another_Hero



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: David dresses Stevie, Eating Disorders, Fashion & Couture, I'm p sure that's what anyone reading this is actually here for, Underage Drinking, Underage Drug Use, a child has some sexuality, a minor feels pressured in a sexual situation, and generally disordered attitudes toward eating and food, beauty culture, pls tell me if there's something you think ought to be tagged, the age difference between tilda swinton and david rose, their pasts were horrible
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:08:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22297588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/another_Hero/pseuds/another_Hero
Summary: David Rose and beauty
Relationships: Alexis Rose & David Rose, David Rose & Johnny Rose, David Rose & Moira Rose, Stevie Budd & David Rose, and various past relationships of dubious quality at best
Comments: 73
Kudos: 115





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic comes with so many thanks ok. I got ideas, information about David's and Moira's and general fashion, and delightful encouragement from whetherwoman this_is_not_nothing didipickles thingswithwings RhetoricalQuestions Distractivate olive2read sunlightsymphony Delilah McMuffin missgeevious Likerealpeopledo Delphina Boswell sullymygoodname vivianblakesunrisebay and surely someone I am missing but also immensely appreciate. Special extra thanks to whetherwoman both for the beta reading and for the love of Moira Rose.
> 
> I know nothing about beauty culture. I don't know how to wear makeup. My ignorance absolutely informed this fic; I did not bring any facts to the table. If you have corrections about specific things in here, I will happily accept them and possibly make adjustments, depending.
> 
> Please mind the tags - there's some real tenderness in here, though I might not go as far as joy, but a lot of it is pretty heavy stuff. I got everything whetherwoman and I could think of as obvious concerns (if something was missed, blame me, not whether; I made this shit happen).
> 
> Title, naturally, is from _My Fair Lady_
> 
> I am planning to get a chapter up every day until it's all up. I'm still mulling over some things in the ensuing ones, but there's a big storm here, so I have all kinds of time.

Lipstick might be the earliest thing he remembered. He could only have been four or five, still undisciplined enough to touch his mother’s things, the day he grabbed the pink lipstick from her dressing table. She was doing her face as she usually did; he was a toddling mimic who’d somehow been allowed into the chamber. “Oh, no, no, David,” she said immediately, snatching the lipstick from his hand, “that’s not your shade at all.”

When he told the story later—to a crisis manager who hadn’t yet tired of managing him, to a handsome hookup who wouldn’t have sex after he’d removed his professional clown makeup—this was the punchline. Depending on context, the story could mean _no,_ I _never had to put up with any family shit for being queer_ , or, _anyway, of course I’m like this_.

But before David had even started to cry, she’d produced another lipstick, her own eyebrow pencil set aside. “This one will do,” she said. She lined his lips, then painted them, then brought him up onto her lap to look in the mirror. “Gorgeous,” she said, satisfied.

When David told the story to himself in high school and college, far from home and free, what it meant was that someone had loved him once.

His lessons began with perfume. For his mother, dressing was serious work, but she enjoyed having a protégé. She told him once, when he was twelve or thirteen and tying a bow high on her back: “You know, no one can do this correctly but you.” He didn’t yet stand as high as her waist when she explained to him that perfume should come from the air. She set the diffuser in his hand, nozzle facing forward. “Now,” she said, “spray the air, go up and down”—she gave a long swoop of her arm—“and then just”—she swayed her hands—“ _breeze_ it onto me like this.” He sprayed, and he had to spray twice to get all the way down; he tried to breeze.

“Well,” she said, “that will do; I’m just going to be at home. All right, then on this side—wait, David, come up here.” She pulled out her chair, and he climbed up onto it. “Very good. Go again.” It was a little hard to spray-but-not-on-her and breeze all of it when he couldn’t step away, but he did what he could manage.

His mother rotated on the spot. “Once more,” she demanded, and he obeyed. “All right, now come down from there.”

“Can I have some?” he asked her.

“You want to wear it?”

David nodded eagerly.

She frowned at the little bottle. “All right,” she said. “Stand still.”

When he was dispatched, shortly after, to the nursery in the east wing, he held his hands up to his face. He knew how the perfume smelled, but he wanted it to be something captured, a new part of his body, proof he could hold out to Adelina and say, “This is from my mom." But it was never quite there, attached to his shirt or his skin. Instead it floated around him, rarely in reach for long.

His mother happened to be in the entry when he got home the day Nadine pushed him down at school and tore his windbreaker, and so he ran to her instead of Adelina. “Mom!” he said. “Nadine pushed me at recess.”

She looked down, and he could see her eyes were glassed over. Maybe she’d been sleepy, or maybe she would be soon, and he should get to the nursery before she was. “I’m busy, dear,” she said. There was a person standing beside her holding a painting.

“She said my fauxhawk was ugly.”

His mother didn’t offer him any justice on this point, just said, “Well.”

“I fell down.”

“And you got back up,” his mother agreed.

“She ripped my jacket.” He held it out to show her as proof.

She knelt down obligingly, though she swayed in the effort and ended up sitting to the side of her knees. “Well,” she said, “let’s see about that.” The person with the painting set it down.

“It really hurt,” David said, now that he had her attention.

She reached tenderly for his wrist. “Oh, don’t worry, dear,” she said, “the tear is just on the seam. Although”—she looked him over—“you could just replace it. It’s last season, and you’ll outgrow it soon.”

“No,” he insisted. “It’s my favorite jacket.”

Moira looked up at the painting-hanger and rolled her eyes. “The whims of children,” she said. “Fauxhawks, windbreakers, I tell you, I hope taste is made, not born.”

“Mom!”

“David,” she said, “give your jacket to Mr. Gold when he comes on Thursday. He can fix it. Now go to the nursery, all right, Mummy’s got to hang this painting.”

In the weeks before the Little Mister pageant, he often had his mother’s full attention. It was an unfamiliar sensation, and often an unwelcome one. The first half hour of training or makeup prep, he felt important, grown up, working. This was what his mom did, he knew, sit before a mirror to form herself into something better. The feel of other people’s hands on his face was purposeful. But there was so much of it to sit through, and by the end it could feel brusque and rough. All of that, just for his mother to examine his face and deem it not quite right.

Or there was his routine, where he just made more mistakes the longer he tried, plus the backup routine, which he would use if Cyndi Lauper ultimately joined the judges—there was a rumor. They practiced every day until Adelina’s tentative interruption that it was time for dinner, and sometimes they didn’t stop.

And the tailor—if David didn’t keep perfectly still, the tailor would stick him. He loved the new outfits, but he never got to wear them. His mother would take a look at his tuxedo and request another alteration, and then he had to go back to be pinned again.

“Why do I have to do this?” he finally protested, arms crossed in front of a whole rack of costume changes.

His mother put her hands on her hips severely. “David,” she said, “fashion is the first way we tell people who we are.”

He looked at the rack, no idea what he was telling with a magenta sequined jacket. Some clothes were cool, he knew that. But none of the kids at the school he was currently skipping to be here would think—well, the girls might think magenta sequins were cool. He was pretty sure he wasn’t trying to be a cool girl, but maybe he could be, he thought, and he felt warm, and he pulled on the jacket and tried to walk in it like a cool girl, like Sandy from _Grease_ post-transformation. He leaned on the wall and looked at the rack of clothes like it was handsome, and he tried to giggle the way he would giggle if he was wanted.

“David,” his mother called sharply, turning back to him, “Take that off and give it back to Mr. Gold. It’s time to practice. We’re going to nail that entrance.”

Eventually—despite the wrath he incurred when his mother found out he’d made Adelina call Mario Lopez for help, despite his own sulking when it turned out that Mario, who was kind and undeniably cool, who had him imagining patterned button-up shirts under that magenta jacket, was too afraid of his mother to keep coming back—Moira Rose approved the look. She walked around him once, bent at the knees and the hips to critically examine his face. “That’s it,” she said to the makeup artist. To David she said, “Go look in the mirror.”

He thought he looked like a doll. He was prettier than anyone he knew in real life, prettier than his mother right now in her training leggings. Of course it had taken all this time. She came up to the mirror behind him and ran a thumb over his cheek. It was a little unnerving; when he was with her, he never expected tenderness. He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to do something back—they’d never really hugged, and he wasn’t such a baby that he’d just hang on her legs. Anyway, it didn’t go well, in his experience, to touch her unless asked.

“I hope you stay beautiful,” she said. “That way someone will always love you.”

Sometimes he was allowed to sit on the divan in her dressing room before an awards show or a premiere and watch the preparations. Before the 1990 Daytime Emmys, Adelina situated him with a pacifying bowl of popcorn and strict instructions not to get up. His mom was sitting in a robe a few steps back from her dressing table, some opaque green product on her face, some staff David had seen before finishing her nails. He polished off the popcorn while a woman with large hands massaged something into his mother’s damp hair, dried it with a noisy machine and precise movements, teased it a little, and twisted it up off of her neck. While she secured that in place, someone else cleaned his mother’s face and started pouring the contents of bottles into their own hands, then spreading them in little circles over her cheeks, forehead, chin, nose.

“Pretty boring, huh?” the hairdresser said conspiratorially to David. But David shook his head and turned back to his mother. He couldn’t imagine anything less boring than sitting in a silk robe while people touched you and touched you with skill and focus into something inarguably lovable. Then the makeup started, and he loved the way that fat shining artist looked at a face like it was something that could be perfected.

His mother removed her robe and stepped neutrally naked into one of the three dresses on the rack. The stylist adjusted it onto her body, pulled out a needle and white thread and made an invisible stitch. He didn’t know why she had three dresses, was still too young to learn the conventions of presenting and after-parties, but it seemed only natural that someone so glamorous should need three dresses in a night. The second was similarly checked-over, along with a pair of white shoes with high, blocky heels. And then the grand frenzy of the red-carpet dress, smooth black satin, straps and sashes over it to be lain in place, a chain. His mother was serene and authoritative at the center of the whirlwind, expecting the hands on her body, critically reacting to the state of things as they advanced in the mirror. David had rarely thought of her as capable before then, the way that Adelina was, who knew how to fix things, or his father, who knew how to tell people to fix things. His mother, he’d always thought, waited for things to be fixed, making her displeasure more and more audible until someone else took it on, and that worked well enough. But here she was, skilled and in charge, transformed by a series of potions into a different Moira Rose entirely.

For years, until he was too old to watch his mother dress, until she was in any case less frequently staffed and less frequently lucid, he sat in while she prepared for every awards show or top-tier gala he heard about, anything with a team to help her.

For years, until he started wanting to think about sex, he thought of a whole crew of beauty workers when he wanted to get himself off, rubbing mysterious serums into his skin and covering them with makeup, turning him into someone pretty.

For his ninth birthday, he asked to attend one of these parties with her.

“Oh, David,” she said, “you couldn’t possibly. You’re too young to drink—or, perhaps there’s a pill—no,” she course-corrected, looking at his dad across the table, “you’re too young for those too, and those events are too dull to get through otherwise.”

“But I want somebody to do my makeup,” he said. “And my hair, and my clothes.”

Surprisingly, she softened. “Of course you do, dear,” she said. “Tell you what, we’ll have all that and skip the ceremony.”

She’d never have taken him to dinner by herself, so Adelina wore her nicest dress beside David in his floral button-down, and they all went to dinner. “Careful bites, dear,” his mother said, “we don’t want to disturb your makeup.” He watched the forks she used and mimicked, and she looked down at him approvingly. “That’s right,” she said. “When one is beautiful, one is observed. Eat like someone is watching you, David, sit up straight like someone is watching you. With a face like that, they will be.”

His parents went to parties all the time; it wasn’t unusual to see them dressed up. But one night he passed by the foyer as they were leaving and found them looking especially glamorous, like people who couldn’t possibly be parents. They were beautiful, more beautiful than ever, so—“I love you,” he tried.

His dad looked confused. “We, uh—we love you too, son.’

His mom frowned at both of them. “There’s no need to be so _demonstrative_ ,” she said. She smiled at David. “Be good for Adelina.”

\- - - -

When the panic attack ended, he took the clothes from his drawers and his cedar chest back to the room with the horrible bed and the rest of his clothes. There weren’t a lot of things left to relax him—he’d scavenged in the corners of all his bags for stray pills, and he could hardly make a habit of couples’ yoga with Jocelyn, and a shopping spree wasn’t an option here. Depressing as it was to set his clean shirts on the motel bed, sorting them gave him a feeling of control that precious little else even approached. Here were things he understood, things that needed his care, things that belonged only to him.

At home—which was to say, in the past—David had sorted his garments first by year, a habit gleaned from his mother, who stowed away most clothes over one year old in boxes labeled with the date to keep until they were vintage. She retained couture—“it’s ageless”—and a few favorite pieces to keep her wardrobe from looking too all-new and uniform; a blend of years, she explained, showed long-term interest in fashion. But a whole ensemble of clothes three or four years old would be an embarrassment. He sighed down at his clothes and pinched his eyes shut before they overfilled with tears. He was going to get out of here before it came to that.

Still, he decided, it was time for a new organization scheme. He could sort by country of origin, by material—either fiber or weave—by designer or house. He mentally sectioned off the polyester-satin surface of the bed into continents. It wasn’t big enough by any means. He returned to his room for some spray and disinfected all of the hard surfaces. Then he arranged the clothes on the bed in their countries.

He’d never done it quite this way before; he looked for commonalities among them, together in their piles. But these weren’t the representative clothes of Japan, Italy, Czech Republic. These were _his_ things, and that was how they looked. The division by country didn’t add much meaning to his clothes; it just gave him proof that he’d been somewhere else, that he’d been someone else, that there was a time when he could go anywhere he wanted. This was a terrible idea—he’d meant the whole exercise to relax him, to make it easier to breathe. If he died in here, he thought wryly, at least they’d find him quickly. His family, for the first time in his life, would note his absence.

When his hand fell on the harness he’d had made in Fes by a local leatherworker, he tensed. Things like this belonged somewhere beautiful, somewhere they could be seen and recognized. He thought about putting it on, observing it himself, since he was the only person in town who might appreciate it. But the light in this room was frankly depressing, and anyway, he hadn’t come here for a morose solo fashion show, he’d come to select the clothes he _would_ wear. He’d never had to do it like this before, introduce himself with fashion to people who didn’t know how to read fashion. Anyone like that would have been expendable, ignorable, before. Now it turned out he might need things from them, like yoga classes, so he probably couldn’t wear the harness.

Anyway, he thought, he wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted them to see. Keeping aloof was probably just as well, dressing like he didn’t need to be understood. He may as well select his most challenging pieces and have people think, _oh, that David, he’s just…David_ , except this harness—it wasn’t comfortable to wear. It could have been; it wasn’t made to be, on purpose. If no one was going to be impressed, why put himself through all of that.

 _You’ll know_ , a harsh voice argued in his head. _If you let yourself go. If you get complacent and_ comfortable _while you’re here, and then you try and go back to how you were?_

Well, there was no risk of getting _comfortable_ here. He left the harness—he was still getting used to proper respiration after the panic attack, he argued to himself—but he took his blue button-down and his tightest pants to start off his current selection of clothes.

He ensured appropriate cohesiveness, a top for every pair of pants and for the one skirt he selected, and appropriate variety, no two looks too similar. The clothing he was taking back to the room where he slept would last him ten days; then he would return and rotate. He set the rest mournfully back in the drawers or returned them to their hangers; he’d done perfect, reasoned, tasteful work, he’d accounted for everything clean, and it had only taken him two hours. There was so much time left to fill, a whole future with nothing to look forward to but re-sorting his clothes. He almost lay down on the bed, but even now, he wasn’t _that_ depressed. The calm that his soft things had brought him had evaporated now that they were put away. It was a sign, probably, that he had done it wrong, hadn’t made the right choice: if he had, he’d be satisfied now at its completion, despite the questionable home he left them to. He should have sorted by fiber, then by weave, then by weight, then by hue. He opened up the top drawer to start again. 


	2. Chapter 2

His father took him to a baseball game exactly once. It was supposed to be to celebrate him joining Little League, though David didn’t know why that required celebration. His dad came into the nursery in a ballcap over his casual tan suit and said, “David, I’ve got a surprise for you.”

David, at ten, was already very clear on his father’s failings as a giver of gifts, so he looked up warily from the felt jacket he was making for one of Alexis’ dolls.

“We’re going to see the Dodgers play!”

“Um,” said David, “I’m working on this—”

“It’ll still be here when you get back, son.”

Technically true; extremely not the point. He’d only joined the team because his dad had seemed so disappointed when he’d said he didn’t want to. He wasn’t yet sure how he was going to get out of most-to-all of the practices and games, but Adelina would help him.

He got that same disappointed face now, though. “David,” his dad said, “give it a try. You might like it.”

“I might not,” David grumbled.

“There’s nothing like it, David,” his dad said, and now he was coaxing, which meant David had the upper hand. The roar of the crowd. The festive air. The hot dogs and the Cracker Jacks.”

“Fine,” David said. “I’ll go.”

Their box was conveniently insulated from the roar of the crowd; it also contained no hot dogs and no Cracker Jack. There were chafing dishes along the wall, and when David looked into them and found sad catering, he grimaced. There was, however, a staff person attending to them. “Excuse me,” David said, “could you get me three hot dogs and some Cracker Jack, please?”

The person went, and David sat at the window while the men ran and stopped and stood. There was nothing fun about this; it was not a good way of talking him into enjoying his season. He admired the focus in all their bodies, the way the man on a base got ready to jump to the next one when the pitcher prepared. There was beauty in their skill, their precise training, but David knew even now that he wouldn’t have the patience. When his snacks came back, he ate them, which was okay, eating ballpark food without having to participate in the crowd of strangers, but then they were all eaten.

His dad had been in conversation for a while with someone whose suit was a bit worse than his, not as well-fit, not as fine. His dad loved to give professional advice. David summoned the staff person. “Um,” he said, “how long is the game?”

“There’s not a timer on baseball,” they said, “but there are nine innings, and we’re in the second right now.”

That was—a lot left, more hot dogs than he could eat. “Okay,” said David, “could you get me some nail polish? OPI in Kyoto Pearl.”

The staff person looked nervously over at his dad.

“He’s busy,” said David. “If he wants something, I’ll just tell him you’re getting something for me.”

The person still hesitated. David had a couple bills in his pocket, like his mom had always taught him to have for getting people to do things. He pulled out the twenty, the biggest one, because the person would probably have to leave the baseball rink to find nail polish. “You don’t have to buy it,” he said. “You can keep the change.”

The person shrugged and left.

The whole time David was waiting for them to get back, watching the men in their tall socks and short pants and thinking about the other images he had seen of tall socks and short pants, which seemed to him old-fashioned and European, and thinking about whether there was a version of it he could wear to school without his mother stopping him or his classmates teasing, his dad talked to the other guy. They refilled their drinks once, but their attention only left each other when the crowd made a loud noise and they looked down belatedly to find out what had happened. This was usual enough with David’s dad; as they left, he’d make some comment about how nice it was to spend time together, how they should do this more often. David wasn’t sure whether he understood the concept of it being nice to spend time together. The whole baseball crews ran back to their friends a couple times before the staff came back, but in the end, David got his nail polish. It was even the right one—he’d been a little worried, was old enough to know there were people who didn’t pay attention to these things. He got a first coat on, and a second, and the game was still going.

“David,” his dad said, “do you want to go outside for a minute? Hold up a banner?” The friend had brought signs, like he was a suffragette from a movie or something.

“I can’t,” said David, holding up his polished hand. “It’s drying.”

“Oh, David,” his dad said reproachfully, “you aren’t watching the game?”

“ _You_ aren’t watching the game,” David said.

His dad’s friend frowned at the nail polish. “Can’t you just wash it off?”

“Wash it off? You really don’t know _anything_ about nail lacquer.”

“David,” his dad said, “be polite.”

“Pretend I don’t,” said the friend.

“It’s not water-soluble,” David scoffed.

The friend laughed at that, to David’s relief. “Johnny,” he said, “where did you find this kid?”

“Oh, you know Moira,” his dad said, like she’d invented David, like he hadn’t started subscribing to _Cosmo_ and _Vogue_ himself so he could learn how to apply makeup and other important things from someone with the patience to teach him. A magazine wouldn’t see the mistakes he made; he could come out with his face done up perfectly and no one would know. Or his hands, in this case.

“I can’t touch anything for fifteen more minutes,” David said. He wished Adelina were here. He could make her feed him nachos.

He couldn’t learn it all from his mother anyway, even if she’d been perfectly attentive into his teens. They had completely different types of skin. He came to the magazines before teen acne started on his face, so when it did, he was prepared. He’d absorbed everything he’d read about T-zones and how to evaluate whether you had oily, dry, or combination skin; he’d searched on Excite until he knew what toner was actually _for_ ; now he bribed Adelina to take him to beauty supply stores, where he scanned their shelves for the products his mother used. If they didn’t carry any, he assumed the store was too cheap and got back in the car to find something worthy of his face. If they did, he asked them questions, listened to their answers, and bought anything they wanted him to try.

In her lucid periods, which could last for months at a time, his mother dressed him. Most often that meant she laid his clothes out while he slept, after she returned from some gathering and before she went to bed. But there were times when she did it during his shower in the morning, and then, knowing she was awake, he was to find her and present himself for inspection.

In the other times, he dressed himself—sometimes in ensembles he doubted she’d approve of, but he had by now a decently critical eye. He might wear more sedate pieces, but he’d never put together a boring _outfit_. Of course their tastes would differ, he thought; they weren’t the same person. He never presented himself these times; it was better not to visit his mother when she had faded out, lest you get caught up in a delusion or guilted into waiting through a non-crisis.

The first time he altered his mother’s design—not dramatically, but he rolled up the sleeves, creasing be damned, and changed out the shoes for what seemed to him a younger, cooler look—was one of the ordinary times when he could assume she wouldn’t see him. She didn’t see him most days, unless there was a wardrobe inspection or a mandatory family dinner, which his father scheduled weekly on Wednesdays and canceled at least twice a month.

David kept at it, making small adjustments to her choices. A heavier top on a cool day, because she might oppose any concessions to nature, but he was the one who had to wear it outside. High socks that were on-trend at his school but likely not among adults. Lighter bangles than hers, single chains. The occasional hat. Correcting his mother’s outfit plans for his own daily use became a part of his morning routine.

Inevitably, predictably, a day came when he would be expected to show her his clothes before school. She’d left out a decent ensemble, but every piece was Givenchy. He was just beginning to fit into their menswear—well, not quite, but he was getting to where their smallest was oversized in a slouchy, could-be-on-purpose way instead of tentlike. But he didn’t want to look like a brand spokesman or something, so he changed out their creased, wide-leg pants for another pair of creased, wide-leg pants, and he added a chain.

When he stood before his mother, she frowned. “Those are not the pants I selected.”

“No,” he said, “I wanted to break up the—Givenchy—ness.” She’d even chosen Givenchy shoes, which he was dutifully wearing though they were a little too big and his feet were likely to slide.

She nodded. “Probably best.” And with that, she shooed him away to school. He never woke up to a single-brand outfit again, though of course that might have been a coincidence, a 

The first time he read about Coco Chanel saying that thing about looking in the mirror and taking one thing off, he posited it to his mom. She was doing up the complicated clasp of a necklace. She raised her eyebrows but didn’t look up at his face. “Coco Chanel was a Nazi, dear,” she said.

He shrugged and pulled a bracelet from her jewelry table. “You should wear this one,” he said. In a moment of boldness, he brought it to her.

She glanced at it, then focused. “Oh,” she said, “so I should.”

Years later, when Raquel in high school quoted that thing to him about the mirror and taking one thing off as he was dressing for dinner, he gave her the same unimpressed, no-eye-contact eyebrow raise, the same “Coco Chanel was a Nazi,” and he put on an extra ring.

His dad kept trying, halfheartedly. He showed up to two of David’s baseball games, and after both of them, he took David for ice cream, even though David got hit with a ball in the first one and sent home, and even though when he did a home run in the second one he refused, as always, to run fast enough that he might kick up dirt onto his cleats. When David refused to sign up for little league again, his dad didn’t pressure him, though he did suggest hockey, which was laughable, because even David knew that sport was terrible for the face. But the worst and weirdest, unquestionably, was the basketball hoop he had installed for David’s bar mitzvah.

It was ugly, for one thing, this patch of concrete on the grounds. David didn’t know anyone who played basketball, or who might want to, even among the people who were cooler than him and wouldn’t come here. But his dad didn’t see reason about things like this. All young men love basketball, he thought, despite the living, breathing son he’d had for fourteen years. David, who had had terrible gifts from him before, knew there was no solution but to use the hoop until it was shown to be a mistake.

He shot baskets poorly, clumsily. David had excellent fine motor skills, but what was the purpose of knowing how to sink a ball into a basket? When the ball fell, he walked lazily after it; didn’t want to look too enthusiastic. He looked at a clock when he started, and he looked at a clock when he broke his nose on a messy rebound: that gift lasted all of two and a half hours. His dad was suddenly busy; his mother took him to the doctor and ensured him the nose job he’d wanted in the first place, and there was no need to speak of it again. And his dad stopped trying to share things with him, which was objectively an improvement. If he was feeling especially grateful, David might have said he got three gifts from his father for his bar mitzvah, only one of which was bad: there was the basketball hoop, there was the excuse for rhinoplasty, and there was the end to all the efforts to make him a normal kind of boy. All that, and then his mom got him what he wanted.

\- - - -

Stevie held up one of his sweaters. “Does everyone you used to hang out with dress like this?”

“Mmmmm, no, that would defeat the point.’

“So what’s the point?”

“The _point_ ,” said David acidly, “is that these clothes tell you who I _am_ , so if I just dressed the same as everybody else—” He rolled his eyes and gave an “et cetera” gesture.

“Oh, so if I put on this jacket, then you and I become the same person.”

“You know that’s not how it works.”

“Does everyone you used to hang out with wear the same designers?”

He snatched away the pants she was holding up. “Well, _those_ were by a seamstress in Milan who only makes four pairs a year, so. No.”

Stevie shook her head. She didn’t let the smile spill out, but David could see it threatening.

“Can other people tell that when they look at them?”

“ _I_ know it!”

“Mm. Because to me, David, they look like just pants.”

He was physically incapable of stopping himself from taking the bait. “Mmkay,” he said, “no, there is no such thing as _just pants_.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Yours, for instance, are boot-cut stretch denim from a kiosk in the mall. Mine”—he gestured to his own legs—“are a slim-fit cashmere-merino blend from Milan.”

“Actually, I bought these at the pharmacy in Elmdale.”

He wasn’t entirely sure whether that was a joke. “I believe that is something you would do,” he said.

“So I guess my clothes are doing a good job telling you about me, then.”

“It doesn’t take an ill-fitting flannel to communicate that you don’t like anything or want to be here,” said David. “That’s literally your whole thing.”

“Where did you learn all this stuff, though?

“What stuff?”

“ _Cashmere-merino blend._ ”

“About clothes? Well, I was trained from a very young age.”

“You’re expecting me to believe you just paid attention as a kid, to like, whatever your parents were saying?”

“Not just my parents, and no, I also _liked_ fashion.”

“I _liked_ pogs.”

“Of course you did.”

“You kept caring about it.”

“Yeah, well?” David shrugged. “This is what I was allowed to want.”

Stevie nodded like that wasn’t unusual at all. Maybe it wasn’t. Probably there were a lot of things you weren’t allowed to want if you grew up in Schitt’s Creek. “Mm, and what does this, um—” She was apparently lost in one of his sweaters. She didn’t seem to realize which hole was the neck. He snatched it away from her, but gently, so he wouldn’t stretch it.

“It’s a sweater,” he said, ignoring her question. “It was a gift, actually. My mother gave it to me for a birthday.” He assumed his dad’s assistant had reminded his dad, who had reminded his mom, and that that was how he’d ended up with gifts from her on about 60% of his birthdays. She did have very good taste, when she bothered.

Stevie, of course, was smirking. “Is that, like, the cool thing?” she said. “Dressing like your mom?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. My mom would never wear this.” His mom didn’t believe in draping; she liked her bodices fitted and structured. “It’s not her style. She bought it for _me_.”

“I’m going to be honest, I’ve known you for, what, two months, and if you dumped out a bag of black-and-white clothes right now, I’d have no way of telling which ones were your style and which ones weren’t.”

“That’s you,” said David.

“I just mean,” she said, “why does it matter so much?”

He gestured to the clothes. “These are,” he said. He tried again. “These are my things.” That wasn’t what he wanted to say. “This is what I chose,” he said, which was a bit better. But then he said, “You know what, let me change out all the clothes in your closet for frilly dresses, and then you can ask me again.”

Stevie nodded. “It’s a comfort, in times of struggle, to know that I have the power to turn off your hot water.”

“Would I—notice a difference? If you did that? Between the cold water I would have then and the water I have now?”

Stevie smirked. “Change out all the clothes in my closet for frilly dresses and you might find out.”

“I’m not going to do that. I’m too busy.”

“Busy.”

“Yeah. I have to organize all my clothes in this disgusting new room.”

“Well, don’t let me stop you.” Stevie was tugging off her flannel, and then she was slipping one of his sweaters on over her T-shirt. “Wow,” she said. “I can get why you like this. This is _very_ soft.”

“Try this one,” he said, tossing her his shirt that said _Don’t._ across the front.

She looked it over. “I know what this one is saying.” She scrunched it in her hand— _scrunched_ it—and threw it back. “Unfortunately for your shirt, I do what I want.”

“Okay,” said David, catching the shirt, “if we’re making this arrangement, we’re going to need to set some ground rules regarding the treatment of my knits.”


	3. Chapter 3

Alexis got to be the cuter one, the one people cooed over when the two of them were trotted out for their parents’ friends. He’d thought it was because she was little. But when she was eight or nine, old enough to choose her own things, old enough to look more like a person than a baby, David realized people would always like her best. Maybe even more infuriating, it became obvious that strangers preferred her clothes to his, the same way they preferred her angel hair and easy giggles. He didn’t know how to be a pretty girl; the pretty girls all somehow did. Nadine at school was invited to every party, even though all she did when she got to them was eat the snacks she’d brought for herself and sit in a corner waiting for people to come talk to her. At David’s bar mitzvah, only half the kids at the party were ever out on the grounds, where the dance floor was, and the go-karts on the new concrete that had been poured for his ridiculous basketball hoop, and the food; the other half were inside, begging Nadine for some of the Pringles. She knew something about making people love her, something about how to move and laugh that David had missed but that Alexis understood. They were old enough now to attend their parents’ gatherings, and Alexis always had a cluster of people around her, chuckling indulgently. David—well, he made a joke once, about the hemline of another guest’s dress. He laughed alone.

The way he hated the pretty girls, that was the same way he loved Lars. Lars was pretty too, a kind of pretty David imagined he could be, fluttery hands and clothes that made him look careful. David couldn’t imagine Lars in the ubiquitous polos or wide-legged pants; he was pretty sure Lars ironed the turned-up cuffs of his jeans.

Lars was also gay, everyone knew it. David wasn’t sure _how_ everyone knew, whether it was just the clothes or he’d said something or he’d been seen—David wasn’t close to the source. But in the tiny microcosm of David’s school, being gay was very sophisticated and cosmopolitan, at least among the people who didn’t play sports. It wasn’t clear to David how they’d feel about _him_ , and he wasn’t in any hurry to find out, but he was pretty sure Lars liking guys was an opening. Lars had the same hunger he did, David could recognize that in the tone of his perfection. Being well-staffed wasn’t enough to make him this neat; if someone never had a stitch out of place, David knew, they were also knife’s-edge anxious. There was something in them that clean lines soothed. Maybe he and Lars could be something for each other, he thought.

He planned out his approach for a week and a half, and then he saw Lars sitting faux-nonchalant in the hall before class and—he couldn’t bring himself to sit down next to him, which felt presumptuous. It wasn’t like David actually thought they were _friends_. Plus, the floor had had all these people’s shoes on it all day. So he stood in front of Lars, feet by Lars’ feet. “I like your shoes,” he said.

Lars looked up. “Thanks.”

They were Chanel. Should David make sure Lars knew they were Chanel? “Coco Chanel was a Nazi,” he said.

“Um,” said Lars. “Yeah.”

David shrugged. “They’re fly,” he said. The word sounded like somebody else in his mouth. With practice, though, he could become the kind of person who said it. When Lars didn’t invite him to continue, he left to go to class.

But no, this wasn’t the right way to start out. He turned back. “Actually, I, um, I don’t really like their line this season? I think a lot of what they’re doing was kind of played out last year. And I don’t like wearing logos, so I’m not really—Chanel, anyway. But the shoes—with other things, the shoes are cool.”

Lars didn’t look impressed, which was disappointing. “My cousin gave them to me,” he said. “I just like them with these pants.” The cuffs met the high tops of the shoes with the barest overlap, the tiny bit you needed to show they weren’t a matched set, that you, in your own creativity, had paired them.

This David understood. “Oh, thank God,” he said. “I mean, they definitely do. But I was afraid I’d just insulted you.”

“You did.”

“Oh,” said David, “well, I, um, I think you’re really cool, so.” Fuck, that was embarrassing, that was not a chill thing to say at all. “Even with the shoes,” he tried, which was almost definitely worse.

“Okay,” said Lars, obviously not intending to return the compliment. David knew it was too much to hope no one was listening, even though the hallway had mostly cleared out. “Don’t you have to go to class?”

David never skipped. There was an uncomplicated satisfaction in getting As, the approval of his teachers, being better than Alexis at something. “I don’t _have_ to,” he said. What was anyone going to do, kick him out? Call his dad’s secretary’s assistant? If it was between Dr. Manji, the rhetoric teacher, or Lars, he knew whom he’d rather please.

Lars _did_ look impressed this time. “All right,” he said. “We should go for a walk.”

The walk turned out to be only as far as a sculpture on the grounds. Students often sat behind it to be out of view of the windows. Lars told a couple of sixth-graders to clear off, and they did. He grimaced at the ground and stayed standing.

David stood facing him, not sure what to say. “Do you—come out here a lot?”

“Yeah, sometimes.” Then, “I don’t have class this period.”

“Oh, uh, PE?” At least half the kids in the school had doctor’s notes that said they shouldn’t take it, David among them. The ones who took PE were the ones who did school sports, or wanted to.

“Yeah, obviously, you think I’m going to ruin my hair sweating in the middle of the school day?”

“I _know_ ,” said David—this was a topic he could discuss at length. “You can’t just tell kids you want them to work hard and then undo all their efforts. And after the hair, you’d have the skincare.” He shuddered, and he waited for Lars to add something. This was a real conversation now, and it was his turn.

But what he said was, “We can just—skip to the part where you suck my dick.”

David didn’t want to seem uncool, childish, but he was pretty sure he hadn’t made that promise. “Where I what?”

Lars frowned. “Isn’t that what you meant? I mean, you offered to skip class, and you came out here where the teachers couldn’t see us—”

David had two very obvious options: run, and become an object of ridicule, perhaps publicly, and forfeit any future interaction with Lars, or—“Yeah,” he said, trying to sound casual, “I’m—I’m into that, I just didn’t know if—you were? Into that.” David had read a lot of Cosmo. He would be able to do a great job of this; Lars would be impressed, would be won over, would want him again and again.

“I am, but you—you have to swallow, okay? My pants.”

David understood perfectly. “You, uh, don’t touch my hair,” he said. But maybe—“I mean, if you really want to—”

“I’m not gonna fuck up your hair,” said Lars.

David didn’t feel especially good or especially bad about the whole thing until he tried to kiss Lars goodbye. But Lars made a face and said, “This isn’t like that,” and he sent David back up to the school building alone. David called Christopher, the driver, to come pick him up and spent the afternoon and evening hot in the shame of having believed that voracious want could have been for him. His dad noticed at mandatory family dinner that he seemed to be feeling down and suggested a shopping trip. David agreed, of course, but he rebelled when his mother wanted to look at Chanel. He used this season’s unoriginal line for his excuse. He and Lars avoided each other—or maybe he avoided Lars, who thought nothing of him—for the last month of school. And then he was in Switzerland in the fall, and Lars was in Singapore—that was the sort of thing you knew, in a social world the size of theirs, and he felt sorry for him then. Singapore meant his parents had found out and didn’t approve; Singapore was legally-enforced conversion therapy for jet-set kids. David would have called him, offered to let him talk, but, well, it wasn’t like that.

When he came home for Christmas his first year of high school, he had plenty of time alone in the sprawling house. Adelina had been permitted a vacation—David’s dad was always idealistic about the family spending time together during the winter vacations—and his parents had fundraiser after business dinner after premiere filling their time. He didn’t exactly _want_ to spend time with Alexis, but he wanted to watch a movie, okay, so sue him, and it was after Christmas, so the house was running on a skeleton staff, so he could scavenge any snack foods from the kitchen, and he just thought—maybe it would be fun to watch it together. But he looked for her in her room, and he shouted for her down the hallways, and he checked for her in the pool house, and she wasn’t there. It wasn’t surprising; even before he left, she’d been out more and more often, places she wouldn’t tell him about because “Ugh, David, if _you_ come they’ll know you’re a kid, and then we’ll _both_ get kicked out,” or places she _would_ tell him about until he was one half jealous and one half disgusted by his own protective feelings. She’d called him once, middle of the day his time, gotten him pulled out of geometry to ask, “Hey, David, what’s Justin Timberlake’s mom’s name?”

“Lynn,” David had said immediately, and then, despite himself, “Why?”

“Oh, nothing, it’s just, I’m at his house, and these guys are trying to get me to come to Belize? Which is like, so sweet, but I have plans with Albany tomorrow, poor thing, so I kind of need to get out of here.”

“And in order to do that, you need the name of Justin’s mom.”

“Yep!” she’d said, “which is Lynn, so. Thanks!” And the line had gone dead.

So David was used to being without Alexis—she had other people, and he, well, he should be able to do better than his kid sister. So he walked into the home theatre, picked _Miss Congeniality_ , and set the snacks on the floor in front of him.

He went for _Pretty Woman_ next, and he was part of the way through _Clueless_ when he heard a crash somewhere else in the house. The room was pretty soundproofed, but David left the door open out of habit, a little anxious _just in case_ in the back of his head. He would have ignored the noise, but there weren’t many people here. He’d just turn the sound off on the movie, check what was happening, and then, if he needed to, he’d lock himself in this soundproofed room. So he paused the screen on Brittany Murphy’s awkward joy and stepped into the hall.

Alexis was leaning against the wall. “What are you _doing_?” he called out, but he went to her a little faster than a casual stroll. “Alexis—wait, are you okay?”

She was drunk, he was pretty sure, because she wasn’t normal, and—she probably wasn’t _high_ , right, she was _eleven_. But her stare was glassy like their mother’s could be. “Okay, Alexis,” he said, “come on, let’s—” he tugged on her elbow— “let’s go into your bathroom, okay, we need to get your makeup off.”

Alexis pulled her arm away and let it swing until it stopped. Now that he was used to spending time around people his own age, she looked like a little kid, or a toy. She followed him like a little kid too. Maybe she thought he knew what he was doing, which—he’d just have to pretend, for Alexis. He did take off her makeup, looking her face over clinically—had she applied it all herself? It was clean, competent. “Were you just drinking?” he asked, in case he needed to know. “Or, do you know what you took?”

“I didn’t drink. It was just,” she said, “one Vicodin. It was loud there, David.”

“Okay, was it one of Mom’s? Or did somebody give it to you?”

“I planned ahead,” she said. “I took it there.” For the moment, that was less worrying; more broadly—

“Okay,” he said. “Okay, good, well, you’re almost old enough to be an adult on pill bottles, so.” He couldn’t believe Christopher would have taken her out at this time of night. Maybe he hadn’t. “Did Christopher take you?”

She shook her head. “He tells Dad.”

“How did you get home?” He didn’t care about this, he just, he didn’t know how to make her feel better, and if she kept talking, she was still alive.

“Klair.”

That was terrible news, but David didn’t have to solve it tonight.

“Well,” he said halfheartedly, “was it fun?”

“The guys on the balcony invited us up to dance with them,” she said. “Everybody watched us. They tried to get me to drink stuff, but I just pretended because they were strangers.” She said this with no more than a shrug, though the thought of his tween sister having survival strategies for bad men at parties—well, David thought around the clenching in his belly, it was better than her _not_ having them. “You don’t have to worry about me,” she said, absurdly, sprawled across the counter with her back on the mirror. “I know what I’m doing.”

“Well,” said David, because there was no use getting into a fight with her while she was on strong painkillers. “Do you want to come watch Clueless?”

She wrinkled her nose. “I was really lonely there,” she said, tilting her head like it might somehow get comfortable. “Everybody liked me. But I didn’t care.”

The protectiveness curdled in his stomach. “Get up,” he said. He wasn’t going to leave her here on the counter. But once he saw her sit on the bed, he walked out.

His mother summoned him for wig-care training when he turned fifteen. “Now that you’re old enough,” she said, as though it were a matter of law and not merely her whim that made him too young one day and old enough the next. She clapped her hands for attention, though he was the only one in the room with her. “Now,” she said, “we’ll cover cleaning in this session and styling in the next one, because you _never_ style a wig while it’s wet. A wig should be washed every twenty-five wears, and I keep a spreadsheet to track how often—do you want to write this down?”

“No,” said David, “wash every twenty-five wears.” He’d considered just checking out of wig-care training, bringing along a book and ostentatiously reading it in front of her, but—well, for one thing, he was interested, and for another thing, it was always a bit of a relief to find that his parents wanted something of him that he could manage.

“Yes,” she said, “with this shampoo,” which was in a case by the sink. “Never use conventional shampoo. And you condition every two weeks, which is also in the spreadsheet.” If not for the wigs, David sort of doubted his mother would know what a spreadsheet even was. “Today we’ll wash and condition Mary Margaret.” David assumed that meant his mother would wash and condition Mary Margaret and he would observe. “Now, you don’t want to agitate too much, David, especially near the scalp. And never wring the hair dry. The scalp can become misshapen.” She hung her head. “Rest in peace, my dear Bettina.” David had heard about Bettina; everyone within three miles had heard about Bettina. She’d fallen into the hands of an overly-enthusiastic, soon-to-be-fired attendant.

David watched his mother move Mary Margaret to a waterproof form and wet the hair. “Don’t over-agitate,” she repeated, rubbing the shampoo into the hair with a tenderness he’d never seen her offer to anything animate. “Would you like to try?”

“Um,” said David, who knew his first attempt would be rejected on principle and therefore felt neutral about the prospect at best, “okay.” He copied her motions.

His mother watched carefully for a moment, then said a reproachful, “David.”

He took his hands away and looked back up, trying for a neutral face, nothing too eager-to-learn.

“You must treat the wig with love. _Care_. The wig must be the head of someone you adore.”

David frowned. He didn’t _adore_ anyone. He didn’t even have any crushes lately; no one had been paying him extra attention, offering him any treatment that mimicked kindness, so at school he was dully alone. He considered an ex—Raquel, maybe. He had wanted to be gentle with her. But he had never done it that way, and without practice, he couldn’t imagine what that would look like. Arturo, but that flame had died. Maybe Alexis, but she wasn’t a good option: he wanted to protect her, sure, but not more than he wanted to hurt her.

He felt a horrible rush of understanding for his mother. This was the head she had chosen to love: reliable, silent Mary Margaret. Just now he could see why she did it. But no, she had his dad, too, their weird but real thing. Who was she to tell him to _picture_? She had heads to spare.

\- - - -

When he walked into the lobby, David did a double take. Stevie was wearing his favorite leather jacket, his second-favorite of _all_ his jackets. But that wasn’t the problem; it was part of the agreement, and frankly, it suited her aesthetic. The problem was, she was wearing it over one of her wilted blue flannels and a pair of her baggy jeans.

“Okay,” he said, holding a hand up facing her whole look, “no, nope, no. Come on.”

“But David, we have a deal.”

“Yeah, we have a deal that you get to wear my clothes, not that you get to wear them with _polyester_.” He gestured and waited for her to follow him.

“Okay,” she said, looking around the room, “what, are you gonna dress me?”

David grimaced. It wasn’t an unpleasant concept; Stevie was hot, and she could look at home in things too big for her, and he knew the clothes in this room. If he dressed her, she would look _good_. But—“You’re not a _doll_ ,” he said. “I’m going to _select_ some pieces I think you might like. For the protection of my second-favorite jacket.”

Stevie was waiting expectantly.

“Fine, and I might also give you advice on how to wear them.”

“There it is,” she said. “I get that, I mean, I’ve only been wearing clothes for thirty-three years.”

“I feel like I’m repeating myself,” he said, “but you put my Rick Owens leather jacket over a flannel that you probably stole off a corpse.”

“He was still alive, actually, which definitely made things awkward.”

“Okay!” said David. “I changed my mind! I am dumping all of my clothes in the creek!”

Stevie rolled her eyes. “Dress me, David.”

Just because she wasn’t taking this seriously didn’t mean he couldn’t. He looked her over with care, though he saw her every day, and she was always wearing the same clothes when he did. Stevie might not know it, but dressing someone mattered. If you did it right, they could feel—

He had to get out of here. He couldn’t do this, care about pretty girls with bad clothes, this wasn’t him. But he couldn’t leave either, not just now. He turned to the nearest rack.


	4. Chapter 4

Dominique was only the third person in boarding school to make eye contact with David for slightly too long. Two days later, Dominique admired a cluster of older classmates on their way to a rave. Over the long weekend—all his weekends were long weekends, since none of the classes at the school met on Fridays—David flew into Prague for a haircut and a shopping spree. He didn’t have to sneak out of school; it wasn’t a place that tried to keep him in. Its purpose was to give him the expensive diploma his parents paid for, not to trap him away from the world.

David’s usual designers didn’t offer much in the way of neon or bright colors or sparkles, and he’d been hoping to forgo couture on this excursion—custom-made took time. But he made a bet on Valentino that paid off, and he found some Gucci, and Rick Owens—a designer he’d been aware of but never quite dared to try—filled in some crossover goth-aesthetic pieces that David considered rather daring. He spent half of Sunday trying the clothes on, walking around a hotel room, learning to act at home in them. Once he could wear them naturally, he knew, the clothes would make the introduction, would show him to be the kind of person who dressed like this. He kept looking at his hair in the mirror until the rough-precise slash of the new cut ceased to be a surprise. He put on a full face of makeup and removed it, switched from black eyeliner to electric blue and debated its merits as an everyday look. The makeover couldn’t be _just_ a Dominique thing, that was obvious: it never was in the movies. Eliza Doolittle didn’t go to all that trouble just to please Henry Higgins, Sandra Dee—well, all right, maybe the movies were split. And maybe Dominique would like him better, want to watch him, want to have him, want to know him, want to love him. He practiced a shrug. A shrug looked different in this new body. The raver aesthetic wasn’t _about_ detached indifference. Maybe there was something to this—he’d be honest now, even about what he wanted. That was who his clothes said he was. That was what everyone would see.

He got back to school in the evening, torn between wanting to shop the look around and wanting to hide it until his first class in the morning. It wasn’t the outfit, David thought, of someone who hid.

So he walked to the common room and pulled out a book. He’d done his homework last week, at least the homework he intended to do; he didn’t like to have it hanging over him. So he pulled out _Tales of the City_ to reach for himself. Changed his mind and switched it out for his sketchbook. No matter how he looked, this was still a high school, and furthermore, it was one where enough people came from his circles that things had made it back to his parents before. (His parents had never paid any _attention_ , but he just couldn’t stomach the thought of this talk. His mother would find a way to make it her thing; his dad would either try to talk him rationally out of it or get all sincere, all _you know we support you no matter what_ , like David had reason to know any such thing.) Of course, the idea of drawing in his sketchbook in front of the entire school was also deeply embarrassing. But he could open it to a random page and draw triangles and wait to be noticed. Lena, his last therapist, had suggested he might create intentional errors in the inside of his sketchbook, or work some fast exercises, to free himself from expecting perfection on every page. Within the privacy of the Moleskine, she’d argued, some things could be made flawed and forgettable, and no one would know but him. First of all, he’d argued, _anyone_ could open it, and second of all, _he’d_ know, and why ruin a page with a mistake?—but this moment, allotting space to something thoughtless and trivial, he could blame it on Lena.

No one said anything about his clothes. After eight minutes, defeated, he went back to his room; instead of leaving for dinner, he ate the kolache he’d had the foresight to bring back with him from Prague.

Dominique didn’t say anything in class the next morning; David couldn’t tell whether he was imagining a long glance, but he knew there hadn’t been anything more. So he caught Dominique on the way out of class. “I got these shoes in Prague this weekend,” he said.

“Oh yeah?”

“They reminded me of Miranda’s, you know, and hers are really cool.”

That brought a crinkle to Dominique’s eyes. “They are. She has the flyest style.”

“Yeah,” said David, “I—” but Miranda was right there, and Dominique was turning to talk to her.

He got his first eating disorder on purpose. Everyone glamorous had them. He figured either he’d look Cindy Crawford beautiful or he’d look desperate, wanting, and maybe he should. At school, there was no one paying close enough attention to try to intervene; he watched his bones appear alone. He wasn’t sure it was having the effects he’d hoped, except that every time he went down half a size, he got to buy a whole new wardrobe.

“You look different,” Juno said the second time.

David hadn’t exactly been vying for the attention of Juno, who was mousy and known to write poems. But he _did_ look different, he looked different on _purpose_ , and it was such a relief for someone to say so that he answered, “Yeah, I, uh, I went shopping this weekend. My old clothes were too big.”

Juno didn’t look impressed at that. “Are you sick?”

“No,” said David. “Yeah,” said David. “I might be.”

When he went home for the break, his dad assumed there was something wrong with the school, asked if he could order in there, to his dorm. His mother didn’t comment on the new body, just the new clothes: “You aren’t a pastel person, David,” she said, brushing his yellow jacket. And who was _she_ to tell him, he thought, except that she was usually right about these things.

He was sick, definitely, it turned out, but so was everyone he knew. Dominique only ate vegetables, only raw or steamed; Raquel weighed herself every morning and used it to decide whether she was allowed to eat that day. They talked about it in the dining room, like it was something to bond over, “Are you eating today?” and everyone chimed in.

“I can’t eat if anyone’s watching me,” David said to the school doctor, convinced that it must be something wrong, that the people in the movies who had meals with their families and hot dogs with their bosses and sandwiches in delis with the people they crushed on were all doing better than he was.

The school doctor, though she’d never spoken to him before, said, “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

So by the time he met Tilda Swinton, David was accustomed to coming and going from his boarding school at will, unattended-to and unmissed. When it became known that he was planning a trip to Berlin, his classmates turned attentive, though some dropped off when he learned that rather than the jet, he was thinking of taking the train, for the novelty. Still, he arrived in Berlin a little floaty from a week of praise for his new jacket and appropriately impressed reactions to the Alice Walker he was reading and late-night conversations about his life where people, like, listened, and asked follow-up questions. Maybe it would be fun to be here with them.

Dinner stretched his good mood like taffy, wide and thin. Someone else had brought e, David wasn’t sure who, and a third of the group was already high. It was kind of funny, he supposed. Everyone ate well, in the sense that the things they ate were excellent; everyone was glad to be there. But they couldn’t agree about where to go next.

Joseph wanted a gay club—“It’s _Berlin_ ,” he said, which was a fair argument, though he’d probably have made the same one in the same tone in San Francisco or Istanbul or Beirut. Raquel was going to bail for some local friends, and there was no suggestion that anyone else was invited. Jess wanted to go to an underground, invite-only sex show, and Juno _really_ didn’t. Ruth, who by her disdain for everyone else’s choices remained perpetually the coolest of all of them, got a text about a house show. It was sort of in a suburb, but like, “Cabs _exist_.” Ichiro had rolled his eyes at every option so far, and Dominique wasn’t listening, just drinking. David had chosen this weekend because it was one of two a year for this multi-day rave that, embarrassingly, _Alexis_ had tipped him off to the last time around, but—“Those things are all high schoolers,” said Joseph.

“No,” said David automatically, “no, it’s too exclusive.” There was no recovering socially from showing up to find a room full of other clustery, chattery teenagers. Moni hadn’t been invited out in three years, since she’d recommended the wrong club.

Joseph raised his eyebrows. “ _You_ got an invite,” he said.

“You don’t even need one to go to Berghain,” David scoffed back, but he’d lost already. No one would come with him. He thought of going to the rave anyway, alone, and coming back to them so wired and free that they all knew it had been the best offer going. But if he went by himself, there was no way to prove his fun, no evidence to present to his friends that he was the one who had made the right choice.

So they went to Jess’s thing, once Dominique made fun of Juno for being scared of it, once they all agreed, if not in any words, that it was their edgiest option, and so their best.

So of course, when Tilda Swinton looked over his clothes between acts and said, “That’s a very daring ensemble,” in a way that really did sound like praise and not like _you’re a child among children_ —of course he went back with her to the apartment in the rare downtown high-rise and undressed against the walls of windows. He told himself no one could see him. He was used to views like this, meaningless strangers and the messy places they made stretched out while he was insulated from them, inside, and he didn’t meet Tilda’s gaze, and he didn’t look down.

He had no trouble seeing her again, either. They met for the second time in London, in an empty white room where a stranger, Philippa, helped cover them in paint. When he looked uneasily at Philippa, Tilda shrugged: “She likes to watch.”

Where the first time had been—well, basically like getting himself off, but with instructions, which he kind of liked, actually—this made intuitive sense to David. He rolled them and rolled them; he pressed their bodies together and turned her over, fucking her into the ground. When Philippa came back to re-paint them, he understood her purpose too. They were together for hours, acting half for pleasure and half for the proof of it, the only way David knew how. He looked over the floor after, and some of the walls, at the effects of his calculated exuberance, and wondered what Philippa would do with the paint. Tilda, still naked, eyeing Philippa, brought him water and sent him back to his hotel without a shower. When he got there, he pulled out his sketchbook and rubbed a page of it against his thigh. On the facing page, he noted down the shapes they’d left on the floor, evidence that someone had wanted him.

Other people didn’t do this, David thought once, hours into a deep-dive on retinols, didn’t treat their bodies like art they were making. But other people weren’t this beautiful unless they did. In all the not-looking he did at New York strangers, it was easy to compare.

The first artist he featured in his gallery was a self-important femme who came to their first meeting in a pink dress and a full beard. “I’m not interested in contradictions,” she said without introducing herself, opening her portfolio. “I think people want to find them where they don’t exist.” She was a sculptor, and her practice for the last year had been to shape the same figure over and over with no intentional differences. “Of course, they’re all unique,” she drawled. “They all bear the marks of my hands. But the discipline, that’s very important.”

He went back with her to her studio and let her fuck him on the table, surrounded by not-quite-identical ceramic swirls, until one of the figures dropped off the edge. He froze, afraid she might be upset, but she just giggled into his neck and said, “There’s _that_ one distinguished.”

He thought the art was bullshit, but he wanted to see her again. If he were starting over, working from raw clay on a new body every month—that was how he yearned for her. He looked at her and thought, _I’d make that_. Better-coiffed, of course, cleaner hands, more expensive clothes. But Dora, with her big white gloves a third as elaborate as his mother’s, was a template.

She loaded in the pieces of the shattered sculpture, nothing holding them together. All the statues sold; David had secured her career. She un-friended him on MySpace.

For her fiftieth birthday, he bought his mother a dress. It was a Yohji Yamamoto with a big looping knot at the neck, made to her measurements. He knew her, maybe not well, but as well as she did: he knew her style. He had tracked its changes over time even though he didn’t see her often. The dress wasn’t as harsh as some of the pieces she favored—it was rough and well-structured, but not architectural, not so strappy—and when she put it on, it was like he’d written that softness onto her.

“Oh, David,” she said, giving herself a careful scan in the mirror, “it’s divine. Impeccable taste, as always. How about Juliet?” He pulled the wig from its hook. And when she was ready, he offered her his arm and escorted her down to the party.

Sebastien got it, that was the first thing David knew about Sebastien. He was homelessy in a very expensive sort of way, and he got how David’s body was something designed. When he said, “I’d like to photograph you naked and surrounded by pins,” David thought that was a sign of his comprehension. When he said, “I’d like to cover your clothes in ink and blood”—David could see he’d been correctly interpreted for once. Those lines were just the first night. He took David home and went so slow David ached for it. For the first month, everything he said, David heard, “I see how vulnerable you are.”

For the second month, everything he said, David heard, “I want to show people how vulnerable you are.” It sounded right; it was what David had always failed at doing. It didn’t go sour until three and a half weeks in. Sebastien charmed the doorman into sending him into David’s building unannounced, let himself in—David never would learn where he’d gotten a key—and found David in tears beside an empty pizza box while _She’s All That_ played on the facing TV. “Oh, angel,” Sebastien said, coming to stand in front of him, several feet away, nothing like comfort. “I wish I had my camera. You look—”

 _Disgusting_ , thought David.

“Tragic.” Maybe he was. “Tell me the next time you’re doing this, yeah?”

“This, no, this is—” David wiped his eyes and didn’t dare say _secret_. He knew well enough by now that secrets weren’t something Sebastien would allow. “This is a cliché,” he said instead. That was why it was secret anyway.

“Sure it is,” Sebastien said, “but on you?” He brushed David’s shoulders. “Angel, you’re art.”

\- - - -

David pulled the D.Gnak lace-up hoodie and offered it to her.

“Does this have shoelaces across the front of it?”

“You dress every day in the uniform of disaffected youth, Stevie, lacing up is your aesthetic.”

“Kinky.” She took the sweatshirt. “I like it.”

“I know.” While she tried it on, he pulled out the Zara sweatshirt with the pointing faux leather—she’d like that one, and if he could get her to wear Zara instead of one of his higher-quality pieces, so much the better. He’d picked it up in Madrid, when Julia refused to go back to the hotel at the onset of weather and David couldn’t let the cashmere he was wearing get soaked. And he pulled the Valentino panther sweatshirt—she’d probably laugh at it, which was just as well, it didn’t deserve to be covered by a jacket, but she’d look amazing if she put it on—and he considered the Givenchy Doberman sweatshirt but decided he didn’t want to offer her that kind of power, and, amusing himself, he brought out the Acne Studios You First sweatshirt. The Helmut Lang one with the mohawk hood was an option—she’d laugh, but Stevie seemed like a hoodie-layering person. And the Helmut Lang button-down with the black detailing, though she might get lost in something more tailored—Helmut Lang was a great option for Stevie, actually, he thought, and he shuffled through his things, but he already knew he hadn’t brought any more. He’d never owned much in the first place; he’d always thought they leaned a little too obvious. But—

“Oh my God,” said Stevie, “is this a sweatshirt with a fauxhawk?” She removed the Valentino immediately—she did look good in the Valentino, he noted, not that he was surprised.

“Um, well, a fauxhawk is actually only at the front of the head, so—”

“Oh,” she said, “is there a specific term for this, then?” She put on the sweatshirt, the hood over her head and hanging down in front of her face so all he could see was her laughing mouth.

“They, um, they call it the mohawk sweater,” he said faintly.

“False advertising!” she declared, punching a fist in the air like a bad-fashion revolutionary. “It’s not spiky enough to be a mohawk.”

“All right, well,” said David, who could tell there was a spirit of things he wasn’t getting into but was pretty sure he preferred it that way. “Do you like any of these?” She liked several of these, obviously. That was why he’d picked them.

“I’m gonna stick with the lace-ups,” she said. “You know, in the spirit of disaffected youth. They’ll go with my Chucks.”

“Very good,” said David. “Now, for the pants, you are absolutely not cuffing anything that isn’t denim, and you are—very small, so you’re going to have to cuff, so.” She wasn’t very small by the size calculus of New York City, but she was much smaller than he was. “I assume we want _ripped_ jeans? For the _fuck the system_ vibes?”

“Of course,” said Stevie, who was pulling on the drawstring for the hood now she was back in the lace-up sweatshirt. She really shouldn’t do that; there would be stretching. But she was having _fun_ with this, David realized. He wasn’t sure he’d dressed with someone who found it fun before. Honestly, he hadn’t dressed many people; most everyone he dated had been too particular, assured of their own tastes, and most of his friends had never invited them into their homes. His mother had always had a vision of her own, so he’d only chosen if he was buying her a gift. It felt like something Alexis would do, to get someone ready, even if it was just for a shift at the motel. Dressing each other was what girls did in the movies. In makeover movies, it was how you turned someone into a person you loved. David tried to feel it, the fun she was having, though her life here was as pathetic as his. This horrible room seemed suddenly too full—the two of them, their beautiful bodies, and all the hope he’d ever felt.


End file.
